Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 118 words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.[1]

The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, have led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional languageNewspeak.

Some basic features of Toki Pona's Subject Verb Object syntax are: The word li usually separates the subject from the predicate; e precedes the direct object; direct object phrases precede prepositional phrases in the predicate; la separates complex adverbs from the main sentence. The language is simple enough that most of its syntax can be expressed in fewer than a dozen lines of Extended Backus-Naur form:

Note that the above words do not specify number. Thus, ona can mean both "he" and "they." In practice, Toki Pona speakers use the phrase mi mute to mean "we." Although much less common, ona mute means "they." However, the phrase sina mute for a pluralized "you" is strongly discouraged.

Whenever the subject of a sentence is either of the pronouns mi or sina, then li is not used to separate the subject and predicate.

With such a small vocabulary, Toki Pona relies heavily on compounds to make more complex meanings. A typical example is combining jan (person) with utala (fight) to make jan utala (soldier, warrior).

Nouns do not decline according to number. jan can mean "person", "people", or "the human race" depending on context.

Toki Pona does not use proper nouns; instead, it uses proper adjectives, which are the language's only open class. For example, names of people and places are modifiers of the common root for "person" and "place", e.g. ma Kanata (lit. "Canada country") or jan Lisa (lit. "Lisa person").

Ideally, the aim of Toki Pona is to reduce all noun phrases to just the core noun itself; through context, a noun phrase initially introduced as jan utala suli pi pona lukin (handsome important soldier) would eventually be reduced through context to jan. The attempt here is to reduce all concepts to their base form, or in other words, to see something as it really is. From the aforementioned example, a handsome important soldier is still essentially a person.

This can be changed with the particle pi, "of", which groups the following adjectives into a kind of compound adjective that applies to the head noun, which leads to jan pi pona lukin = (jan (pona lukin)), "good-looking person."

Toki Pona does not inflect verbs according to person, tense, mood, or voice. Person is inferred from the subject of the verb; time is inferred from context or a temporal adverb in the sentence. There is no true passive voice in Toki Pona; the closest thing to passivity in Toki Pona is a structure such as "(result) of (subject) is because of (agent)." Alternatively, one could phrase a passive sentence as an active one with the agent subject being unknown.

Some verbs, such as tawa = "to go", which in English govern prepositions, do not take e before their direct objects.

Some words have archaic synonyms because they were changed to avoid a potentially confusing minimal pair.
For instance, ona ("he, she, it") used to be iki but was changed because iki is too similar to ike ("bad").

Because of the small number of words in Toki Pona, single words from other languages are often translated into Toki Pona using two or more words, e.g. "to teach" is translated into Toki Pona by "pana e sona", which literally means "to give knowledge".[2]

Toki Pona has only five root words for colors: pimeja (black), walo (white), loje (red), jelo (yellow), and laso (blue). Each word represents multiple shades: laso refers to words as light as cornflower blue or as dark as navy blue, even extending into shades of blue-green such as cyan.

Although the simplified conceptualization of colors tends to exclude a number of colors that are commonly expressed in Western languages, speakers sometimes may combine these five words to make more specific descriptions of certain colors. For instance, "purple" may be represented by combining laso and loje. The phrase laso loje means "a reddish shade of blue" and loje laso means "a bluish shade of red".[1]

Toki Pona has root words for one (wan), two (tu), and many (mute). In addition, <i lang="x-tokipona">ala can mean zero, although its more literal meaning is "no" or "none."

Toki Ponans express larger numbers additively by using phrases such as <i lang="x-tokipona">tu wan for three, tu tu for four, and so on. This feature was added to make it impractical to communicate large numbers.

An early description of the language uses luka (literally "hand") to signify "five." Although Kisa has deprecated this feature in the latest official description of Toki Pona, its use is still common; from January to July 2006, it was used 10 times more often as a number than in its original sense of "hand" [2]. For an example of this structure, see this posting, which uses luka luka luka wan to mean "sixteen."

Toki Pona's official literature consists of proverbs, some poetry, and a basic phrase book. Aside from the official literature, a number of Toki Ponans have created their own websites with texts, comics, translated video games, and even a couple of songs.

There are currently 10-20 proficient speakers and several hundred enthusiasts.